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MOOCs and Shopping Carts: Tracking Digital Education’s Evolution

What do you think digital education will look like in 10 years? Photo: James F Clay/Flickr

There was a time when no one was sure how e-commerce would work. It started in 1994 when Pizza Hut began taking “orders” online. (It was really just a form that would take your address and phone number, and they’d call you to take your order.) SSL became the standard for safe transaction on the Web, and consultants began charging millions of dollars just to put together rudimentary online storefronts with basic shopping cart systems for timid brick-and-mortar stores.

Everyone knew that e-commerce was going to be big — it was going to “change everything.” And, well, they were right. It did. Right now, I can go to Amazon.com, type in a few keywords, check the ratings, select a product, click the “Buy Now” button, and 24 hours later it’s on my doorstep. This is e-commerce nirvana, and it only took a decade to get there.

So, what happened during the decade between Pizza Hut and Amazon Prime? Retailers scrambled for an e-commerce strategy. What about a simple CGI form? No, let’s do one of those Flash-based catalogs. Wait, maybe we should do a Yahoo stores site. How does drop-shipping work? Aside from countless false starts, frustration and fraud, there were actually a lot of critical milestones achieved and billions of dollars in commerce bought, sold and delivered.

You see where I’m going here? The current (r)evolution of education is sort of a slow-motion version of e-commerce from the 90s, but no one knows where we are in the cycle. Are we in the middle of 1994, where PizzaHut.com tell customers “give us your number and we’ll call you back,” or are we closer to 2004, the year before e-commerce zenith was achieved by Amazon Prime?

If you haven’t been paying attention to education recently, let me get you caught up. In the late 1990s, some pioneering schools started to offer online courses to their students. These were (and most still are) very rudimentary lecture-capture based systems. In 2002 MIT posted a jumble of lecture notes and video captures online and christened it “MIT OpenCourseWare”. Then, in 2006, Kahn Academy gave the finger to institutions by putting thousands of 5-minute videos online that seemed to teach students better than the institutions could. In 2011, Stanford pulled in 100,000 students from around the world to take an artificial intelligence course and sparked the coinage of the term MOOC (massive open online course).

In the meantime, college tuition over the last decade has increased twice as fast as medical care and three times faster than the consumer price index. Tuition, books and boarding are now more than $20,000 per year at many state schools (and that’s with the discounted in-state tuition), and delinquency on sub-prime student loans is at an all-time high, with 1 in 3 more than 90 days past due.

Demographics are shifting, too. College students aren’t all the bright-eyed bushy tailed 19-year-olds anymore. Degrees are increasingly stitched together between part-time jobs, daycare and commuting by late 20-somethings who are neck deep in the realities of being an adult and trying to level up by getting the degree that they missed out on the first time around.

Education in this country is broken. It’s not that we can’t educate people well; it’s that the economics aren’t sustainable, and more than a trillion dollars in tuition is at stake, not to mention the future of our enlightened society. The value of a college degree has dropped 15 percent in the last decade while state tuition has risen more than 70 percent. Institutions need to be cheaper and easier. I don’t mean watering down academic rigor — just eliminating the scenario of rushing to an evening lecture via a cross-town commute after putting in a 10-hour day, only to find that lecture has been cancelled and you didn’t get the memo.

E-commerce became a thing because it’s cheaper and easier for everyone. Digital education is becoming a thing because it’s cheaper and easier for everyone. Don’t get me wrong: Harvard isn’t going to close its doors anytime soon and direct people to the Harvard YouTube page, just like email didn’t kill the postal service. In fact, the seemingly ubiquitous e-commerce in the U.S. still makes up only 5 percent of the $4 trillion annual retail spend, but it’s here and it’s real. The transformation of education from analog to digital is also here and real, but it’s just small and in the awkward juvenile phase.

I suspect we’re closer to 1994 than 2004, but it’s happening and we’re in the middle of it. Right now, the conversation around online education is focused squarely on MOOCs, and it’s hard to separate the hype from the hope. That’s because we’re still experimenting. Like the evolution of e-commerce, we’re figuring out the digital education model through trial and error, and we’re not there yet.

Over the next few years, this discussion will move from our current state of inflated expectations — “MOOCs will end war and solve world hunger” — to a natural place where digital learning eases financial strains, broadens access to education and improves the quality of instruction. Once education’s e-makeover fully plays out, we’ll remember it as more of an evolution than a revolution, requiring time, patience and lots of tinkering.

And like Pizza Hut’s early parlay into e-commerce, the eventual plateau for digital education will likely look very different than these early disruptions.

Josh Coates is the CEO of Instructure, “a technology company committed to improving education.” He also founded Scale Eight.